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Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Laura Petro had ordered Hinton released after granting the state's motion to dismiss charges against him.

Hinton was convicted of murder in the 1985 deaths of two Birmingham-area, fast-food restaurant managers, John Davidson and Thomas Wayne Vason.

But a new trial was ordered in 2014 after firearms experts testified 12 years earlier that the revolver Hinton was said to have used in the crimes could not be matched to evidence in either case, and the two killings couldn't be linked to each other.

Hinton was 29 at the time of the killings and had always maintained his innocence, said the Equal Justice Initiative, a group that helped win his release.

"Race, poverty, inadequate legal assistance, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence conspired to create a textbook example of injustice," Bryan Stevenson, the group's executive director and Hinton's lead attorney, said of his African-American client. "I can't think of a case that more urgently dramatizes the need for reform than what has happened to Anthony Ray Hinton."

Stevenson said the "refusal of state prosecutors to re-examine this case despite persuasive and reliable evidence of innocence is disappointing and troubling."

Hinton was accompanied Friday by two of his sisters, one of whom still lives in the Birmingham area. Other siblings will fly to the area to see him soon, Stevenson said.

His mother, with whom he lived at the time of his arrest, is no longer living, according to the lawyer.

Hinton planned to spend at least this weekend at the home of a close friend. He will meet with his attorneys Monday to start planning for his immediate needs, such as obtaining identification and getting a health checkup, Stevenson said.

The plan now is to spend a few weeks to get oriented with freedom and "sort out what he wants to do," Stevenson said.